Art of Letting Go Series

Part 11- The Secret

It can be very telling when people ask ‘How to do I get rid of this issue?’ as the very question itself already suggests the reason as to why this person is still having the issue.

For when someone says I want to get rid of an issue, what they are silently expressing is that they don’t want to learn and grow through this situation but rather somehow want it to be quickly removed. That is, there is a resistance to feeling and experiencing their issue in its totality and unfortunately what we are resisting tends to stick around longer.

“What we resist persists”

While it may seem healthy to want to get rid of our stuff, this attitude of wanting to ‘get rid of it’ actually blocks us in dropping the issue. Typically an issue remains an issue until we have learnt and grown through it, only then does it drop away by itself. Here in lies the secret to clear our issues more quickly and efficiently.

“We don’t let go of our issues, they let go of us”

It can be seen that our issues don’t always drop away when we decide to let them go or even if we have diligently worked on them. People sometimes realise this when an issue they thought they had dealt with years ago has come up again in a healing session.

As we don’t seem to have complete control over our healing, I would therefore suggest that we don’t demand or expect to quickly get rid of our issue, but rather create the invitation instead.

“Invite not Demand”

By the creating the invitation we create an openness within ourselves, and when we are open we have a better opportunity for our issues to be seen more clearly and dealt with. Conversely demanding or expecting an issue to quickly clear typically brings us into contraction and thus minimises our ability to deal with the issue.

And we can create this invitation by opening up to our feelings and feeling them in order to release the pain that is surrounding the issue.

“Feeling our pain creates the invitation to let go”

I will illustrate this further with the following example; Susan, whose father left the family when she was a baby, has an issue with not trusting men in a relationship. This issue can play itself out in various ways, including the tendency to be jealous if her male partner has contact with other women, not believing him when he talks about where he has been, living in fear of him leaving her… to name just a few. The acting out of this issue causes her and her partner untold drama & pain and ironically may push Susan’s partner away, thereby justifying her belief that she cannot trust men.

To clear her issue requires Susan to go into her feelings and feel/clear the pain of when she felt hurt by men, including how she felt abandoned by her father. For as an adult Susan may recognise that her dad left her mum, but as a child all she understood and felt was ‘dad left me, he abandoned me’.

“Beliefs magnify the issue”

By feeling and clearing the old pain, unconscious beliefs may come up such as ‘the men I love will leave me’. Uncovering such beliefs support further emotional clearing, as old beliefs can hold even more painful feelings that would only magnify the issue at hand, and thus need to be cleared.

During this process of feeling and clearing emotions and beliefs, the fuel that drove Susan to act out her issue is removed, creating the invitation & space for it to drop away by itself. Quite often the issue drops away quietly without us even knowing, until one day we realise that the very thing that use to be problematic for us has gone away.

In short, trying to get rid of our issues is counterproductive, instead, create the invitation for it to leave you.